STRANDED HORSE - Humbling Tides

The Frenchman Yann Tambour is not one of those reclusive devotees of arcane languages, nor one of the many "Western" artists struck by fascination with the traditions of other worlds that have lately found considerable favour in indie music circles. And, obviously, he has no origins or ancestry that would justify an ethnographic interest in African sounds and culture.

Indeed, his distinctive artistic path tells of a career that began grappling with a romantic, pulsing brand of electronica under the alias Encre (a couple of albums in the early 2000s, among which the excellent "Flux", from 2004, deserves particular mention), reaching its first turning point in 2006 with the EP "Encre A Kora", on which he discovered for the first time the kora, the traditional harp-lute played by the Mandinka people of West Africa.

The following year Tambour took on the name Thee, Stranded Horse, releasing "Churning Strides", an album built around guitar, kora and hints of songcraft, a work of undeniable charm but all too uniform due to an instrumental blend that wasn't quite fully realized and songwriting that was still rather green.

And so, after various experiences including an encounter with Ballaké Sissoko, we arrive at the present, at the dropping of the "Thee" and thus at what can effectively be considered the second chapter of Yann Tambour's second artistic life. Written for the most part in 2008, during a stay in Bristol, and subjected to a long and meticulous polishing process back home in Normandy, "Humbling Tides" starts from the same premises as its predecessor, yet develops them in two directions: sharper compositional definition and a more fully realized integration of spiced sonorities with the legacies of more or less ancient European traditions.

In the eight tracks of "Humbling Tides" there is in fact not simply a bridge thrown across the Mediterranean by an artist of modern European sensibility, but also, and above all, the pursuit of an expressive syncretism that transcends the more superficial and obvious one of a supposed common thread between enigmatic African mysticism and archaic expressions of European music, such as that of Renaissance singers and bards.

The result is a record essentially centred on Tambour's guitar picking and the dance of his fingers across the twenty-one strings of the kora, which in turn gives rise to an equally lively flow of notes that shine serenely alongside his soft voice, taking on now the crystalline tones of a solitary song to the moon, now more typically ancestral ritualistic inflections. But there's more, since, far from any "touristic" interest, the French artist manages to truly make the sounds of deepest Africa his own, reworking in their light medieval madrigals and chants, flashes of refined lyricism and even a daring cover of Smiths ("What Difference Does It Make", which repeats, with decidedly better results, the experiment carried out on the previous album with Marc Bolan's "Misty Mist").

If the warm shadings and melodic repetitions of "And The Shoreline It Withdrew In Anger" and "Shields" can suggest links to the acoustic purity of a Mark Kozelek or a José González, the continuous shifting of intonations and the impetuous surge of the central section of "Halos" (eleven minutes) and the propitiatory dance that closes "They've Unleashed The Hounds For The Wedding" evoke a mysterious asceticism, the density of whose sonic body stays at a safe distance from any virtuosic excess.

There's also no shortage of disorienting transpositions of a grey Parisian winter sky onto an African one, achieved with rare completeness in the whispers of the first part of "They've Unleashed The Hounds For The Wedding" and in the only two tracks sung in French, "Les Axes Déréglés" and "Le Bleu Et L'Éther", fittingly enriched by Carla Pallone's violin (Mansfield.TYA) and Joseph Roumier's cello, which lend a romantic aura to chansons that, particularly in the second case, aren't averse to spilling over into post-chamber dialogues between harmonizations and sinister hisses. But, beyond the cohesion achieved among the work's heterogeneous constituent elements, what's most striking in relation to Tambour's artistic background is the substantial similarity of certain cadences and harmonic structures (especially in "They've Unleashed The Hounds For The Wedding" and "Jolting Moon") to those of the electronic compositions released as Encre; the instruments are completely different, yet the "signature" of gleaming note sequences is shared, alternating enchanted stillness with oblique movements, now slowed down, now juxtaposed at ever-increasing frequencies.

And for this reason too, “Humbling Tides” ultimately proves a convincing attempt to forge a connection between a postmodernity free of formal retrospective exercises and primal musical traditions that are usually overlooked by the revivalism so frequent in today's indie constellation.

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29/12/2010